Welcome to the EaaSI Community Forum! This space is intended as a one-stop shop for EaaSI community members - whether you’re one of our Network partners, a digital or software preservation practitioner, or just an interested onlooker - to interact with each other, follow news and announcements from the EaaSI program of work, discuss emulation and software history, or report bugs and issues with the EaaSI platform. Anyone is welcome to register for an account and join in the conversation. This post is intended to provide some guidance on the Forum and its features, to get you started.
The EaaSI Community Forum is built on and hosted by Discourse. Any of their general documentation for new users should apply here, but I’ll highlight some particular things to note as well:
Categories
Any user who signs up for the EaaSI Community Forum can see a number of general-purpose sub-boards or “Categories”, including Project Announcements, Emulation and Tech News, Software Help, and the EaaSI Support Center. Each Category has a general description for its intended topics or questions, but please do not worry about posting in “the wrong” place. The EaaSI Community Forum is a new space, and we would rather you voice your thought or question and we can sort out the organization as we go.
If you are a member of one of our partner institutions/organizations, you may also be added by an EaaSI staff member to a relevant “Group” and receive access to private sub-boards/Categories just for those Groups. EaaSI staff adds users to these groups either based on external communications or using the domain of the email address you used to register. If you have any problems with permissions (e.g. you do not see these private/locked categories despite being affiliated with one of our member node hosts, please contact @ethan.gates directly here (or by email at ethan.gates at yale.edu)
If you have suggestions for a new Category or other feedback on the Forum’s structure - there’s a Category for that! Please let us know by posting a new thread in the Site Feedback section.
Emails and Notifications
By default, users should receive an email notification from the EaaSI Community Forum when:
- When someone else directly mentions the user OR a Group that user belongs to in a topic (by using the “@[user_name]” or “@[group_name]” features when writing a new topic or reply)
- Someone directly messages the user (by clicking on their user name, then “Message” on their user profile, to start a private message thread)
- Someone quotes the user
- Someone replies to a topic that the user started
- The user has not “been seen” on Discourse in the last 60 seconds (that is - if one of the four actions above occurs, but the user is still currently logged in to the Community Forum, they will receive a notification in the upper-right-hand corner of the Forum, but NOT an email)
Users can change and control their email preferences for the EaaSI Community Forum at any time by navigating to their profile Preferences:
This allows users to sign up for email digests, “Mailing List” mode (allowing the user to write replies to the Forum via email, rather than navigating to the Forum itself), and adjust the defaults above as desired.
By default users will also receive notifications within the Forum for any Category or topic if:
- Another user mentions their “@[user_name]”
- Another user quotes or replies to them in a topic
- Another user replies a topic the user started
Users can adjust these defaults on a global level, across the site, again in their profile Preferences:
Users can also receive and adjust notifications in the Forum for specific Categories or even individual topics, if desired, using the Notification “Bell” button on any given Category overview page, or on a topic (the Notification button can be found on topics on both the right side and bottom of the page:
Discourse offers a number of different notification levels, depending on whether the user wants to receive more or less granular notifications related to that Category or topic.
EaaSI Support Center
If you are looking for technical support with the EaaSI platform - reporting bugs/problems/errors, need assistance with intended workflows, want to make a feature request, need clarification from our documentation, please head to the EaaSI Support Center and first read the EaaSI Support Guide. That topic contains our staff policies and guidelines for getting you help as quickly as possible. If there is no existing topic in the Support Center that addresses or answers your question - please post a new one! (And do be patient - EaaSI is still a small team working on grant funding. But we value our community’s experience and use cases above all, and will work as hard as we can to resolve your problem or question!)
Voting on New Features
The EaaSI Support Center has a sub-Category called “Feature Requests”. We use this to discuss and funnel functionality that the EaaSI platform does not yet support, but could. In this sub-category/board, Voting is enabled! If you see a feature discussed by other users that you would also like to see added to the EaaSI platform in future development, you can upvote that feature by clicking at the top of the page.
The EaaSI team has a lot of big ideas for where we can go with our platform, but we want to hear from our users in the EaaSI Network and beyond as well. Voting on feature requests helps us gauge community need for particular functionality and prioritize our work accordingly.